Enjoy Villars: the test

Villars sits at 1253 metres above sea level in the western part of the Swiss Alps. Switzerland Tourism

As part of our report on the “Enjoy Switzerland” pilot project, swissinfo paid an anonymous visit to Villars to test customer services.

Villars is best known as a ski resort and is popular with Swiss, French and British tourists. In summer, it has an extensive hiking and mountain-biking network.

My visit to Villars begins before I leave home – with a call to the tourist office to find out about accommodation.

The person on the other end is friendly and extremely helpful, explaining the pros and cons of the various hotels in the three-star price category.

I then choose my hotel online, selecting La Renardière which boasts renovated rooms in a quiet, wooded area of the village. I receive a positive reply from the hotel within six hours of sending a request.

Rolled up sidewalks

It is a quiet Sunday evening when I get off the train in Villars. The place is deserted: no people or even signs to point me in the direction of my hotel.

I am left to follow a creased map that I printed out from the Villars website, and I eventually find La Renardière after a couple of wrong turns.

The hotel receptionist more than makes up for this minor inconvenience by greeting me with a huge smile and leading me to my room.

She tells me not to be afraid to ask if I need any information on things to do in Villars.

And in case I feel like stretching my legs in the morning, she tells me Villars has more than 300 kilometres of hiking trails and there are maps at the reception.

Mountain views

For dinner I randomly choose a restaurant with a terrace enjoying splendid views of the mountains on the other side of the Rhône valley.

The waiter at the Hotel-Restaurant du Golf is quick to seat me and immediately sees through my French accent, bringing me an English menu.

The headwaiter is even more hospitable, appearing out of nowhere to dismantle a sun umbrella which is getting in the way of a picture I want to take of the sunset.

He then cheerily makes his way to a table of demanding British tourists, switches from French to English without missing a beat – or losing his charming French demeanour.

A final test of his patience is when I hand him a SFr200 ($144) note to pay for a SFr40 meal, but even this fails to shake his resolve.

Mountain biking

Mountain biking in the hills above the resort is the order of the next day. The staff in the sports shop where I go to hire a bike are friendly, but not very attentive or informative.

But within ten minutes, I have a bike, helmet and trail map – no questions asked.

No one seems concerned enough to ask about my ability, describe the difficulty of the terrain or help adjust the bike saddle.

I realise things are finally starting to go wrong for me in Villars when they send me off to a cable car station that has stopped running for the season.

“Yes, yes, it went out of service yesterday, that’s right” is the embarrassed response I get from the person at the sports shop when I stop by to inform him.

The only mechanised alternative up the mountain is a cog railway, which gets me to the top in about 15 minutes.

Faded signs

I pull out the bike map to choose one of three routes which start from this point.

The bike map is quite detailed, but as I discover over the next couple of hours, the bike signs have been neglected.

Because they are either faded or point in the wrong direction, I continually lose my orientation.

Back at the shop, the staff shrug their shoulders when I tell them of my misadventures. They place the blame on the tourist office.

So off to the tourist office I go – the best place to round off my test of the resort to see how they respond to complaints.

And here, Villars comes up trumps.

The person behind the counter hands me a complaint sheet and after I fill it out, she hands it to the director of tourism himself.

swissinfo, Dale Bechtel in Villars